“Hurray for the Riff Raff”: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Preached at All Saints, Collinwood, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 30 March, 2025

Readings for Lent4C:  Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11B-32

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." (Luke 15:1-2)

Imagine that Jesus has come to town for a visit.  He’s sitting at a big table somewhere, eating lunch, and the people sitting with him and listening intently are pretty sketchy.  There’s some bar flies from Moguls, sitting with a few property developers with sleazy reputations, alongside a disgraced former politician, a known drug dealer, and the minor hockey coach who was fired for, well, you know.   

The next table over has some downtown business leaders, a few local pastors and Probus types, someone with the Order of Collingwood and various other upstanding citizens.  They’re also listening to Jesus, but they all have sour faces and disapproving expressions.

In today’s parable Jesus is speaking to at least two audiences.  Jesus seems to be eating with “tax collectors (collaborators with Rome) and sinners”, so he is speaking to them.  Jesus is also aware that there are good religious people watching, “the Pharisees and the scribes”, who don’t approve of his choice of table companions.  So, when Luke says that Jesus “told them this parable”, the “them” is ambiguous but I think we can safely assume that Jesus is speaking both to the riffraff and to the pious folks.   

I said “at least audiences”.  Are there more?  Yes,  there’s a third audience, us, for the gospel always speaks to God’s people in the here and now.  What we hear today may depend on which character in the parable we identify with.   It’s often said that the genius of the Parable of the Prodigal Son is that, depending on our life experience, we might see ourselves in one or more of the three characters, the Father, the Younger Son, and the Elder Son.  

So let me ask you a related question:  if we go back to the start of the gospel reading, which audience do you identify with - the riffraff, or the respectable religious people?  Your answer to that probably depends on whether you see something of yourself in the Younger Son or the Elder Son.

How you answer that question of who you identify with is your own business, but in case you think it’s a trick question, let me help you by saying that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a good person.  Scripture encourages us to want to better.  Saint Paul, for example, tells us to “Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 1.14), the spiritual gifts being “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5.22-23).  

What’s important to note however is that Paul isn’t talking about self improvement or self help.  A gift is something given to us by another, and spiritual gifts come from God our Father.  The trap of Christian respectability is that we can delude ourselves into thinking that we can impress God with our own efforts, which is exactly the trap that the Elder Son in the parable falls into.   The Elder Son is a perfect church person - pious, hardworking, and flawless - (what congregation wouldn’t want him as a warden?) - but because of his respectability he can’t allow himself to share his Father’s joy at the return of his brother, the Younger Son.  The love and gifts that his Father lavishes on his spendthrift brother scandalize and offend the Elder brother, who thinks he should be rewarded and his brother punished.   

Does the Elder Brother ever come around to forgiving and welcoming his Younger Brother?  Jesus doesn’t tell us.  We may hope so, but I think the point of the parable teaches us that there is a vast gulf between our ability to love and forgive and God’s desire to love and forgive.   In our bible study this week, we talked about how difficult it can be to love and forgive, especially when we have been greatly wronged.

 There may be people in our lives that are so toxic and so hostile that forgiveness and reconciliation are impossible.    In such situations, if we have been hurt or victimized, we may need to exclude someone from our lives in order to protect ourselves and those we love.  In such cases, we need to remember that love and forgiveness are spiritual gifts, and that God might find ways to heal and reconcile when we can’t, if not in this world, but the next.

So, have you figured out yet which audience in the parable you identify with?  Do you see yourself sitting with the upright and uptight, or do you see yourself sitting with the riffraff?   If the latter, no worries.  Someone once said that evangelism is just one hungry person telling another hungry person where they got free bread.   The Younger Son comes to himself when he realizes that he is starving.  He goes to his Father hoping for a little bread, a hired man’s wages.  Instead he gets a feast, because God’s always up for a good party.

Maybe the lesson for the Elder Brother, and for all of us church folk, is that we were hungry, and are fed abundantly, because God loves the riffraff.

Citizens of Earth and Heaven: A Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on, March 16, 2023, the Second Sunday of Lent. 

Readings for Lent 2 (YrC): Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

“But our citizenship[a] is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Phil 3.21) 

I’m sure you’ve had that moment when you land in another country and you’re in a queue at immigration, that moment when you hand over your Canadian passport and you think “I’m so glad you I have one of these”.   Having a Canadian passport when I travel makes me feel a little like having a magical charm, something that says “I’m one of the good guys, I’m harmless and inoffensive, why would you give me any trouble, I’m Canadian”.  

It’s often said of Canadians that we have a quiet sense of pride in our country, that we’re nice, polite folks, but it’s also said that when push comes to shove, we can be fighters.  Yesterday I saw an article in The Atlantic magazine with the title, “The Crimson Face of Canadian Anger” and we can all understand why that is.   

When you hear “Fifty First State”, doesn’t your blood pressure go up a bit?   It says something about us as a country that when we feel threatened we turn to the language of hockey fights and use phrases like “drop the gloves” and “elbows up”.  I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, because I’ve served in uniform, I’ve worn my country’s flag on my shoulder, and I know damn well that my nationalistic buttons are getting pressed.

In times like these, one of the challenges for us as Canadians and as Christians is to remember that we have another identity and another loyalty as citizens of the kingdom of God.   When we were baptized, the priest drew the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and said “I sign you with the cross, and mark you as Christ’s own for ever” (BAS p 161).   As I like to say at confirmation classes, we actually have two passports, one as Canadians and one as citizens of the kingdom of God, and that second passport was issued to us at the font.

Which one of our two passports has precedence?  Which one is ultimately more important?   For Paul, who was a Roman citizen, the answer was simple.   As he wrote to the Christians in Philippi, “our citizenship is in heaven” and elsewhere in the letter he writes that the Philippians are “children of God”.   He was writing these words as a prisoner in Rome, awaiting a trial for preaching the good news, the gospel, of Christ, for which he would ultimately be executed.  Paul knew that being a Roman citizen would not protect him from punishment for putting Jesus first, for saying that Jesus was lord of heaven and earth and putting Jesus ahead of the emperor in Rome who called himself a God.  Many Christians  would learn the same hard lesson in the centuries of persecution that followed.  

Being a Christian in Paul’s day and in the early church was counter-cultural and sometimes dangerous, but as time went on it became comfortable.   If you don’t mind a quick church history lesson, in the fourth century the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire.  As Christianity spread, if a king or ruler converted, then his people were considered Christian.  After the Reformation, the rule of thumb was that the religion of the ruler (Protestant or Catholic) was the religion of his citizens (Cuius regio, eius religio).  Church and state gradually grew apart, but some of us can still remember a time when Canada considered itself a Christian nation.   

Today it’s much more complicated.   Christmas and Easter are holidays, but we also acknowledge Ramadan, Passover, and Diwali as important religious dates.   We now see diversity as a positive good, so we see being Canadian as a common, collective identity, whereas being religious or irreligious is a private, voluntary matter.

In some ways we are a lot closer to Christianity as it was in Paul’s time then we are to Christianity as it was when Canada was founded.   While we’re not persecuted, and we get a nice tax receipt for our offerings to the church, we find ourselves, as I said last Sunday, on the margins of a largely secular society.   As Christians we don’t control the national agenda, but we don’t suffer from our irrelevance.   In fact, many Canadian values - civility, tolerance of difference, equality, universal programs - are compatible with and adjacent to Christian values.

So of course when we hear certain neighbours say that we should be the “Fifty First State”, of course we as Christians and as Canadians should get riled.   Our country is worth defending.   But here’s where we need to remember our second passport as baptized followers of Jesus, because we know that there is a dark side to nationalism.   

It can become an irrational force that makes people say “my country right or wrong”.  It can divide neighbours, as we saw just five years ago when people who disagreed with Covid regulations and vaccinations began to wave large flags and call themselves the true Canadians.   Nationalism can be used by politicians to incite hatred and target minorities who aren’t really one of us.  Nationalism makes civil and reasonable conversations difficult if not impossible.   If you doubt that claim, then imagine that you had a neighbour or a family member who genuinely believed that Canada should be fifty-first state.   How would you feel about that person?  Would you even try to talk with them?

It’s hard these days to separate the blather and bluster from reality, and maybe there is no real threat to the country that we love.   But whatever happens, we always need to remember that our identity as Christians matters in the here and now.  When Paul writes that “our citizenship is in heaven”, we might think that he is talking about some future reality, because he goes on to say that it is from heaven that “we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ”.  But Paul also says elsewhere in this letter that we should live for Jesus on earth while we wait to be with Jesus in heaven.   He tells the Philippian Christians that they should “live your [lives] in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Ph 1.27) so that they “shine like stars” amidst the people around them (Ph 2.5).

What does it mean for us in this strange and fearful time to live lives worthy of the gospel of Christ?  I would say that it means to live in hope and in kindness.  It means valuing everything good about our country of Canada while wanting Canada to have more ofthe things that God teaches us to strive for - justice, dignity, and compassion for all.  It means praying for our leaders while giving our ultimate allegiance to Jesus as our Lord.  

We give our loyalty to Jesus because we know that he will never lead us to dark places. Jesus calls us to love rather than to hate, he calls us to welcome strangers instead of fearing them, and he calls us to act like brothers and sisters rather than as enemies.  These are good values for citizens of heaven, and they are good values for citizens of Canada.   May God bless us, and may God bless and protect all that is good in our beloved country.

Lent Madness

 The lack of engagement on my Lent Madness posts here, and my own lack of time, means no more updates on this engaging Lenten pastime.  You can find Lent Madness content here as well as on the All Saints Collingwood Facebook page.